Conflict and Anger

Typically, the more direct the conflict, the less anger it tends to provoke. At the extreme, I don’t think too many people have flipped the table because someone captured one of their pieces in a chess game. … On the other hand, indirect conflict, which is perhaps, another way of saying passive-aggressive conflict, tends to produce stronger feelings. For example, spite-drafting a card in a drafting game, taking the last of a scarce resource in a resource management game, or blocking someone out of a needed action spot in a worker placement game are all the sort of thing that tend to irritate people in a way that blowing up their troops does not.

That seems about right to me. No one objects to killing in a murder simulator. People get up in arms when you take the last wheat that their imaginary sheep needed. The harshest PvP MMO in history is A Tale in the Desert, where the explicit Conflict discipline was about playing friendly games of open competition, while Leadership and Worship gave you the chance to kill people in a permadeath game.

: Zubon

Like this:

LikeLoading...

Related

One thought on “Conflict and Anger”

A Tale in the Desert, where “betrayal” hurts the most because people are expecting others to act nice and “cooperate” with the group over the self, and then are abruptly disappointed when someone else’s self-interest takes the front seat.

Mind you, the group cooperation always seems to benefit certain people (like the ones who first came up with the scheme) first over everybody else. ;p

I loved watching Test of the Obelisk drama, and the equivalent of the “dollar auction” in flax bidding for the first microphone channel of Egypt.